This is the Forward’s coverage of Orthodox Judaism, which aims for a stricter observance of halachic law than Conservative or Reform Judaism. It includes Modern Orthodox Judaism, as well as Haredi (sometimes called ultra-Orthodox) Judaism,…
Orthodox Judaism
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Fast Forward Mayor Declares Attempts By Orthodox Jews To Buy Up Homes an ‘Invasion’
The mayor of a town adjacent to the Orthodox Jewish stronghold of Lakewood, New Jersey, says a comment he made about Jewish home buyers invading his town does not make him anti-Semitic. Thomas Kelaher, the mayor of Toms River, was quoted in a recent Bloomberg News story as saying that Orthodox Jews are trying to…
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Fast Forward Women’s Western Wall Prayer Session Attacked by Ultra-Orthodox Protesters
A women’s prayer service at the Western Wall was disturbed by protesting haredi Orthodox men and women. The Original Women of the Wall group held morning services on Monday using a small Torah scroll that they smuggled in for the service. The more than 20 women were wearing prayer shawls and phylacteries. According to a…
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Opinion Coming Out as a Gay Orthodox Talmud Teacher
“What is it like to be a Soloveichik?” This question about my well-known rabbinic family name has accompanied me for much of my life. My grandfather was Ahron Soloveichik and my great-uncle was Joseph B. Soloveitchik. The questions about my identity became even more complex when, three years ago, I came out as gay in…
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News Do Buyers Plan To Silence FailedMessiah.com?
There’s a media mystery developing around the anonymous new owners of the muckraking blog FailedMessiah, and growing signs the site’s harsh criticism of the Orthodox community may be permanently silenced. Shmarya Rosenberg, who ran FailedMessiah singlehandedly for more than a decade, announced February 2 that he was moving on. Days later, questions about the blog’s…
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News Remarkable Life of ‘Angel’ David Wichs Ends in Flash of Manhattan Crane Collapse
David Wichs’ remarkable life of achievement and Jewish compassion started in Communist Czechoslovakia 38 years ago. He came to Brooklyn with his parents, earned a doctorate in math from Harvard and lived in a brownstone on the Upper West Side. He just celebrated his third wedding anniversary. It all ended in a flash on a…
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News Western Wall Prayer Fight Ends With Historic Compromise
TEL AVIV (JTA) — Israel’s government on Sunday approved a compromise to expand the non-Orthodox Jewish prayer section of the Western Wall, putting to rest the decades-long fight between Women of the Wall and Israel’s haredi Orthodox religious establishment. The deal achieves what had been an elusive goal: an interdenominational consensus on Judaism’s holiest site…
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Life What Donald Trump and NFL Football Tell Us About Chained Wives
(JTA) — Following eight years of struggle, an Israeli mother named Adina Porat finally received a Jewish writ of divorce, or get, earlier this month, bringing back into the headlines the plight of “agunot” — so-called chained women trapped in marriages and unable to move on because their husbands refuse to grant a divorce. Porat’s…
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Yiddish World How Aaron Frank Became the Unlikely Orthodox Head of Secular Day School
In 1996, Asher Abramovitz, the longtime principal of Kinneret Day School, a non-denominational community school in Riverdale, New York, received an unusual proposition: Aaron Frank, the 27 year-old assistant rabbi of a local Orthodox synagogue, offered to meet weekly with the school’s mostly non-observant eighth graders to chat about Jewish ethics and philosophy, a sort…
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